By the time the cow set down the samosas, covering the spot where he earlier hooved his name, Fox seemed different to Pig.

“Simply marvelous,” Pig said with an air, trying to play it off.

Fox coughed. “May I have more water?” Annoyance puckered her auburn snout.

“Not a problem,” said the cow. “Mind if I brag about our wines?”

“Please do, darling.” Fox had a lovey-dovey way of talking. To Pig, she was not so different from the elegant junk in herringbone patterns on the walls: bugles, radios, troughs, collars, toys, and white puffy gloves.

“I don’t drink,” Fox said, touching the waiter’s hoof. It was gentle. His bell never so much as whispered as she did it. Anyone else would have gotten a bray from all four of his stomachs, Pig was thinking, distracted by the samosas. Their crispy folds smuggled the aroma of mudzhki, the kind Pig’s grandsow used to make with cabbage and sweet layings.

“Enjoy ladies.” The cow’s voice carried in his bell this time. “Your other apps will… Speak of the devil.”

A short dog with kewpie-doll eyes and an apron swarmed with buttons brought two more dishes. Her buttons declared things about cats and Mondays. “Here we have the mackerel slaw with pumpkin fiblits as well as…Fried. Lettuce. Wedges.”

She was a drama puppy. Still, Pig liked her more than the cow. He only looked at Fox when he spoke.

“I’ve been looking forward to this lettuce all week,” Fox beamed.

The waiter waved his hoof over the food. Now he’s the puppy, Pig thought, as he went on.

“Ladies. That is a lot of appetizers, I must say.” He was building up to the question they practiced in the jalopy. “Plus, you’ve each ordered two entrees.”

“Not professionally, of course. It’s our hobby,” Fox explained. Her lashes fluttered as if to flirt and to extinguish at the same time. “Waiter? Can you tell me how they fry the lettuce?”

The cow droned on about wilting thresholds and water-to-oil ratios. Like either of us sniff a shit, Pig thought. If he only knew what dear old Fox—Shall I bake you some clover cookies, darling?—was really up to.

“Now don’t you ladies hesitate to holler if you need anything else.”

Pig felt sorry for him.

“Pig,” Fox whispered once the waiter had gone, “Cut the rooster act. We’re trying to keep a low profile, remember?”

“Aren’t we supposed to be foodies?”

“Sugar, you don’t have to grunt to like food.”

Pig didn’t have a grunt anymore, not the fake one or the real one she used to have. And she hadn’t told people she met on the streets about her grunt since Cleveland.

Fox scraped her claw through the dip and made an embarrassing whelp tasting it. “What’s your favorite, sugar?”

Pig didn’t want to say it was the samosas. “I know you’re the expert at this, Fox, but shouldn’t we be looking for places—”

“We are, dear. We are.” Fox sampled the nachos. Pig was a good six sizes up the rack from her when the rack had her number at all. “Let’s settle in first,” Fox said. “Try the food. Sniff our bearings. Larry’s right about you, sweetie. You are impatient.”

Fox tried it again. “It’s like all of these places agreed to have one strange thing—sauerkraut balls, deep fried pizza, chocolate chicken. Theirs is the lettuce.”

Pig had had sauerkraut every kind of way. “Chocolate chicken? Gross,” she said.

“I know,” said Fox. “That’s from a place I waitressed in Tennessee.”

Pig chewed the lettuce. Before she could ask if Fox did in Tennessee what they were planning to do here, Fox continued.

“That’s back when I was travelling,” she said, “picking up fleas and no-good bucks. I had a restaurant idea—Volpino’s it would be called. It’d be for lovers. There’d be dinner and dancing. Think about it: there’s nowhere to go for dinner and dancing anymore. Where would you go dancing around here if you were married, Pig?”

Nachos stifled Pig’s anger. “I wouldn’t live in Ohio,” she said through mulching chips. Pig had been dating Larry before Fox entered the picture.

“Where would you live, sweetie?”

“New York,” said Pig. “Or California. I don’t know. Just not here.”

A dreamscape of apartments paraded Pig’s mind. A collage of fashion magazines. Areas glimpsed behind pouting weasels in chintz. Rather than models or clothes, Pig’s appetite whetted itself on the sleek furniture abbreviated to sculpted corners in the pictures. She wanted mud-work sofa legs and grass ottomans. She wanted rooms like eggs, albino-smooth and all to herself.

On the other side of Pig’s daydreaming was Fox still barking about the Midwest. Papa Fox worked a road con back when work like that existed. When the waiter brought their entrees, Fox was all business again.

“You must have a real chef back there,” Fox said to him, “to come up with this.”

“This place is perfect,” Fox said after he left. “Paying an owl is a dead give away. Plus, they aren’t new. If a place is new, you stay away, sugar.”

Fox pushed a big knife into a ribbon of steak, scanning the room. Pig dragged her eyes across the knick-knacks, the booths, the mosaic floor. All of it clean and stupid. Yet, Pig knew she did not see what Fox saw.

“If a place is new,” Fox went on, “they might fold under the pressure. You’d get nothing for your troubles. You’d hurt yourself and get paid nothing in the end. Newbies are dangerous.”

Pig muttered something Fox misheard as a request for explanation. Pig let her go on talking. There was more saffron and butter to snort.

“One time I was in Indiana passing through,” Fox was saying. “There was this huge barn turned into a furniture store. Raw wood, chainsaw carved coffee tables, that sort of thing. It was crawling with business. Money-city. So when I came upon nails poking out of the wall, I didn’t think twice. Except, the place was new. After all the blood, the fuss with the lawyers, I was never able to pounce the same way again. I still don’t grow fur where it happened. Only an ugly spot of pink. That’s all I got for my trouble.”

Pig didn’t let on how that stung. “I would’ve burned the place to the ground,” she said chewing.

“I’d get something for my trouble then, huh, sugar?”

The look Fox gave lingered all wrong. Sharp and cold.

“What about the jalopy?” Pig asked. “Where’d you get that?”

“Darling, that car stole half my childhood. It was Papa’s.”

Pig’s plate was empty. The other entrée had not been touched by either of them. It was steak with peppercorn and blue cheese.

“I heard you telling Larry how you bought it at a police auction in Detroit.”

Fox hardly reacted. Pig was hoping for at least a red whisker twitch of concern.

“What I tell that jackrabbit and what I tell you are two different things, honey. Larry’s fast but you’re a friend. And now a partner.”

After Fox said that last part, she scratched her ears for a while. Pig suspected she was hiding something. Maybe Fox didn’t think Pig would go through with it. Maybe she was worried Pig wouldn’t keep her snout shut and stand witness or that she wouldn’t be able to pull off the accident herself. That, and the food, made Pig bold.

Pig’s knife sawed steak juices free. “Why choose me?”

“Baby, I love you but these questions…Look, we’re both drifters.”

The meat tasted even better than it looked.

“And when you get to be my age, you want to pass on what you’ve learned.”

The steak was a perfect teacher. It explained in an instant how Pig had never seared meat the right way.

“Not me,” said Pig high on marbling. “If I learn anything good, I’m gonna keep it to myself.”

Fox looked hard at Pig. Pig wiped her nose. That wasn’t it.

“Well it takes all kinds to make the world go round, doesn’t it, sugar?”

“What do you mean?”

“Only that you wouldn’t teach, but I would. And that’s okay. Our differences make us a good team.”

In accidental sympathy Fox got up from the table. “If you’ll excuse me, my dear, I won’t be a moment.” She smiled at Pig again and pranced down the aisle. Her red head and black ears bobbed over the booths until the sounds of the 70s enveloped her and she was gone.

The waiter appeared just then. “Can I take these plates away for you, my lady?”

Pig could have thrown them at him. His bell chimed as he collected the empty plates she had pushed to the center of the table as if she had not eaten them.

Pig sat there ignoring the noodles and vole on Fox’s side of the table, listening to the chatter from nearby booths. She thought of all the dumb jobs she had worked and thanked her lucky stars that she had never been a server. Her old roommate back in Erie would say that Pig couldn’t handle the footwork, but she’s a junkie now and it serves her right, Pig thought. The way Fox flirted with those dogs at the house where they made the bottle with the skulls on them bothered her. That time Larry brought Fox along made Pig think about her a lot. Why did she act so damn in love with everybody all the time? Inside, behind that sunset smile, did she hate every animal?

Fox returned. “Well, darling, that was informative.”

“What?”

“This place is definitely our mark,” Fox said.

“How can you tell?”

“They’re not up to code, Pig. There’s a short set of steps you have to go down to get to the stallroom. There should be lights on them. And it’s dark as night by that spot.”

“So we’re set then?”

“It’s like I’ve been telling you, sugar, it takes patience. It’s not like I’m afraid.” Her voice wavered. She even trembled a little as she whispered the rest: “There is something else. I shouldn’t even be telling you this but…It’s the light.”

“What about the light?” Pig asked.

“The overhead light by the steps. It’s out.”

Pig could feel her hocks sweat.

“Judging by the way they do things here,” Fox said, “they’ll fix it in the next fifteen minutes. But we can’t do anything rash, darling. You don’t even know what to do yet.”

Pig’s breath quickened. “What is there to know, Fox?”

“What to say. What not to say. Really, sugar, you can’t.”

Pig thought of highways and couches the color of pink ugly skin. “How easy would it be? And how much could we get?”

“It would be a lot easier,” Fox said. “They’d probably want to finish it all quick.”

“At least fifty large. For both of us.” Fox stopped whispering. “But, Pig, the thing is…I’m scared, sugar. I don’t think I can go through with it right now.”

The waiter returned. “Can I interest you ladies in some dessert? We have a quadruple chocolate pie—it’s actually got a fifth layer of chocolate, but I can’t pronounce the word for that—pentup…penta-tuplica…”

Pig couldn’t let him finish. “Which way to the stallroom?”

“Just down that hall. First door on your left.”

“Pig,” Fox said sweetly as Pig stood.

“I have to go,” said Pig. “What is it?” The waiter looked down.

“It’s your skin,” Fox gushed. “Your skin…It looked so lovely catching the light just then. Sorry, sweetie. I’m a sentimental old fool.” She said this last part to the waiter, who received her cardinal grin eagerly. Pig left him to it.

The booths near them had more couples than families. That shocked Pig. The sound of pups shoats, cubs, and joeys seemed to fill the place a moment ago. A moody song played as she passed the only piglet in the dining room—another adoptee, Pig thought, already behaving like the goats she was sitting next to. The place was full of forty-somethings slurping tall bottles with skulls on them. If Fox hadn’t been so strict about it in the car Pig would have ordered as many as her tiny wallet would allow.

She turned a corner. Sombreros, skis, and album covers. Some giraffe with a hoarding problem and a nail gun had been let loose in this part of the restaurant. Pig thought she was lost until she got to the hallway. Sure enough, the sconce by the steps was out.

This place was dangerous, Pig thought. They can afford all this space, a fancy owl, and a herd of morons with buttons on their aprons, but they can’t replace a measly light bulb? If that’s all the hay they got for the safety of their customers, then it serves them right.

Four steps away and Pig thought more about the open road, the way the country looks in a windshield heading somewhere else rapidly. It wasn’t the place so much as the people that made her want to fly—their tails swished so listlessly in the sun, as if all there ever was and all there ever could be had vanished for them a long time ago.

Two steps away and Pig remembered Fox’s story about the nails. Unable to figure out exactly how she would do it, Pig stuttered her heels in anticipation.

One step away and Pig thought of the last time she was back at the barn. Her grandsow was still alive, asking about Cleveland, where Pig was living. When Pig’s sow came in from the trough, Pig could tell she’d had a few more of whatever had been in those empty bottles with skulls on them that she kept buried in the roost. Slurring her words, Pig’s sow made a big deal about Pig sleeping on pads in strange apartments. Pig couldn’t explain it to her grandsow, who was upset by the announcement. Pig wanted to tell her that she was saving up for her own stall, but she couldn’t remember how to say “saving” in Old Grunt and she couldn’t ask her sow, who kept rooting up all of Pig’s failings as Grandsow cried, “ngkyee dorogknayaeeah” and “soyee silayaeeee” (my darling and my sweet), the way she used to when Pig was little.

A realization about Fox dawned on Pig, but it was too late. Her plump pink body was already in motion and gravity is a cruel pilot. Pig heard a voice call out for her to stop. She couldn’t do that anymore. For a split second, with the album covers and skis upside down on the wall and the cow upside down too, looking almost happy to see her in mid air, Pig caught a glimpse of the steps below and thought she hadn’t done it right. She thought she would accidentally land gracefully on her shiny black points, perhaps on the edge of the second step, terrifically unharmed, a perfect landing. Maybe the cow would hold up a sign with a good number on it for her acrobatics. After, she’d have to explain how it was she came to be somersaulting through this unlit area near the stallroom. Maybe the whole thing was a show, performed in restaurants by strange ladies who pretended to be food bloggers and who ordered too much food that only this one, the one who can defy gravity, put away like it was her last meal.

Of course, Pig had no need of those explanations. She crashed so hard on the wooden lip of the bottom stair that it broke clean off its tread. With it came part of Pig’s fibula, which leaked blood where it poked through the pink. The pain bore down in waves. It was white-hot pokers, razor harnesses, and branded loins all in one.

Through it all, Pig heard the cow screaming to the manager, a silver-muzzled dog with a potbelly and a bowtie.

“Is this the one who unscrewed the light?” asked the manager.

“No,” said the waiter fumbling for his cell phone. “That was the other one—her mother—the fox. The mother told me everything. Said this one made her unscrew the bulb. Said she got scared the way this one was acting.”

“Where is her mother now?” asked the manager.

Pig fought the pain, white-hot bands of it shooting up from her leg.

The manager growled, “Where’d her mother go?”

Pig screamed, “That was NOT my mother!”

Before giving over to the fireworks bruising her vision, Pig pictured Fox in the jalopy hungry for an on-ramp. It filled her with jealousy. Pig knew Fox would soon taste asphalt again as a type of dust, the open road vaporized by evening meadows. There would be new places beyond the windshield where dessert might finally be a door, a simple gate, closing a pleasant stall and nothing more.

Originally published in New Ohio Review #22

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Whenever you post about kittens or babies, they freely dole out “thumbs up” on your social media like it’s a WW2 pilot cosplay convention. But when you post about your book, they scatter like cockroaches.

What’s the deal?

Short of ditching them all, pulling on boxing gloves, or crying in a corner, there’s not much resolution you can achieve on your own. So let me offer some help. Let’s walk through the possibilities together of some of the main reasons why your friends seem to hate your book.

1. They aren’t your real friends. Why else wouldn’t they delight to read your latest tween vampire erotic cookbook? A real friend would be there for you, measuring out the blood-root and turmeric sugar. This is your art we’re talking about, after all. Who are these ‘people’ on your friends list anyways…these bodies taking up space at your birthday party or in your house? Maybe it’s high time for some much needed pruning as they say, and now you’ve got just the test for figuring out who stays and who gets the shears. Whip out that book of wonder right when things start hopping– whether at a birthday party, a baptism, a baby shower, or during a dinner date. Just watch how quickly the concept of friendship will be clarified for you.

2. Your books sucks. I know this one’s hard. But let’s consider it, if only for one brief, biting moment. Do your characters speak in commercial jingles? Do you write about their emotions in a broken, half legible English? Is your style the visual equivalent of handwritten “puffy” letters with hearted “i”s in crayon? Is your book about actuaries, Wisconsin, talking firetrucks, taxes, or an ultra-personal obsession? Do your friends make faces whenever looking at your book as if they are appreciating the eye-stinging aroma of cat litter? If so, this might be a good time to review your oeuvre with a critical eye before we move on.

3. You’ve misconstrued the terms of the friendship. Your assumed linkage of “friend” and “patron” is unfounded. Friends want to drink with you. They hit the like button for pics of you taken while drinking, particularly when urged by them. After the hangovers, they feel duped to realize they’ve signed on to your feedback circle. The more generous among them hope for an incentive. Quick! Get out your scissors and make a “Read Three Chapters and Get a Free Beer” card you can stamp for them.

4. Your friends are protecting you. They’ve heard the horror stories about the cruel world creative-types face and they don’t want you to get your hopes up. They think you’re too much of a dreamer already. They have to stick together on this one and be strong. For you. They’re doing it for you. Remember: It takes a village not to raise a village idiot and, by gumption, they’re going to get you through this, kiddo. In no time at all you’ll be back to their version of your “real” self, living the practical life safe in a prophylactic of their creation—which shall be your understanding, for some reason, never to dream too openly again. Now all of this has us shaken up. Why don’t we all just calm down…One Stepford Friend…Two Stepford Friend…Three Stepford Friend…Let’s all count, and we’ll get through this <insert Rick Grimes voice hear> TOGETHER.

5. It’s not you; they hate all books. Like most people who are not writers, your friends don’t read any good writing. Maybe they despise stories. The masses come in two sizes, after all, unwashed and vulgar, and if your friends are people there’s a pretty good chance they could share in the thought that writing, the good kind, is no longer a mass entertainment and hasn’t been since the days when poetry was recited aloud in order to distract people from the unpleasant odors of farm animals, cholera, and themselves.

6. They fear your ego. First a few poems or stories published, then what? The moon! We all know how hard it is to suffer Hoity-toity Helen with her stupid, well-paying new job when we haven’t gotten a raise in years. Or Ordinary Orville with his trophy stupidly beautiful wife. Would there even be room by the hors d’oeuvre table with this new version of you? Your new sense of yourself as an auteur will be hogging up all the ego space usually reserved for the pigs in blankets and the punch.

7. They suffer writer envy. They are unrealized poets and artists with long-crushed dreams. Why should they nurture you when their creative energies were demolished under the gargantuan heels of indifference in their own lives?

8. They fear comparison. Now that you’ve accomplished this piece of writing that you’ve shared with the world, the drudgery of their own lives seems suddenly vivid and achingly impossible to ignore. Compared to you, they’ve got nothing, except maybe a life measured out in coffee spoons. Yeah, that’s a good one. They like that metaphor. Where’d that come from again? Oh yeah, A f$!^%g poem!! Bingo! Your poetry casts them and their shortcomings into shameful relief and they fear you for it. They fear all beauty in the presence of their ineluctable smallness. Ha ha! You are a planet–Authorus–while they…They are but the minute specks of cosmic yada yada –you get they picture. They’re small. And you’re a friggin galaxy of language.

9. It’s not happening at all. It’s all in your head. Not everyone leaves the building when you declaim your writerly accomplishments. A few wide-eyed cheerleaders yet remain. Sure, they’re not the ones with the highest kicks, and sure, the solo they’ve been referring to as the “fireworks” consists mainly of somersaults along the gravel performed with an excess of breathing and tongues sticking out like small children writing their names for the first time. But the point is they’re still there, leading your cheers from the sidelines and maybe it is they who deserve more praise and encouragement from you.

10. Who cares. Much has been learned from our list so far. If this were a work sheet we would leave the spaces here blank. This would be a moment for reflection, a “notes” section for you to continue the bold project of piercing into the conundrums that plague the creative soul. But hey, we do not write because we expect instant gratification or universal appeal—even though we might dream of these golden apples as we write. We write because we do. Write?